<html>
<head>
  <style>
        TABLE {align: center; }
        H1    {color: #ffffff; background: Navy; font-weight: bold; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana; margin: 0px; padding: 2px; }
        H2    {color: #ffffff; background: #4682B4; font-weight: bold; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana; }
        TH    {color: #ffffff; background: #4682B4; font-weight: bold; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana; }
	LI    {font-weight: bold; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana; }
  </style>
</head>

<body>
 <H1>Jumbo90</H1>

 <p>Jumbo90 is a library written in Fortran for creating CML
 documents. Actually, Jumbo allows you to create XML, CML and STMML
 (another markup language closely related to CML).  After a moments
 thought you may ask why do we need a library to write things? I mean,
 you can always type <pre>write(*,*)
 "&lt;cml&gt;stuff&lt;/cml&gt;"</pre></p>
 
 <p>Well, while in theory it is a fairly simply task to write CML, or
 indeed any XML, in any language, in practice it's not quite that
 easy.  Balancing tags that are opened at one end of a 2000 line
 source file and closed at the other or even opened and closed in
 different source files, is an unnecessary memory exercise, and
 balancing them in the right order a pain. More importantly,
 you'll probably only spot your mistake when you try to process the
 file, and given that XML is case sensitive it's a pretty easy to make
 a mistake.  Furthermore, CML elements will often be built up in a
 standard manner using a large number of tags - and it can be fairly
 tedious typing in all of these.  Add to this the fact that it is
 extremely difficult to correctly indent an XML document whose
 structure is as dynamic as that of the underlying program [1] (just
 using write statements).  So, we decided that it was probably worth
 our while to create a library for handling the more tedious or tricky
 elements of creating a CML document.  We also added functionality to
 check the well-formedness of all XML. In fact, most programming
 languages provide utilties for performing these seemingly simple
 tasks</p>
 
<p>The original idea for Jumbo90 came from Peter Murray-Rust, who has
a similar but much more rounded suite of tools written in Java, called
Jumbo.  I then converted Peter's original F77 code into F90, but it
suffered a little from its F77 inheritance, so now the base XML
formatting layer of Jumbo is provided by Alberto Garcia's WXML
library.</p>
   
<p>The Jumbo90 README containing a breakdown of all Jumbo90
subroutines is available <a href="jumbodocs.html">here</a></p>

<br/>
<hr/>
<p align="right"><i>Jon Wakelin, March 2004</i></p>
<p> [1] It's only a cosmetic feature but it's very useful when you
need someone to read the file, of course, there's nothing wrong with
writing a 12M XML file in a single line.</p> </body>
 
</html>
